Happiness and Misery

What makes old age so sad is not that our joys but our hopes cease.

Jean Paul Richter, in Happiness and Misery and Life and Death

Don't underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering.

Joan Powers, Pooh's Little Instruction Book, in Happiness and Misery

Man is only happy as he finds a work worth doing, and does it well.

E. Merrill Root, in Happiness and Misery and Work and Recreation

We would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified.

Aesop, in Happiness and Misery and Success and Failure

The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.

Blaise Pascal, in Happiness and Misery and Love and Hate

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four. If that is granted, all else follows.

George Orwell, 1984, in Happiness and Misery

If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.

Anaïs Nin, in Happiness and Misery and Wisdom and Ignorance

A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in the personalities of the people who live in it.

Henry Louis Mencken, in Happiness and Misery

Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.

Oscar Levant, in Happiness and Misery

Life is ours to be spent, not saved.

D. H. Lawrence, in Happiness and Misery and Life and Death

Joy is not in things, it is in us.

Jess Lair, in Happiness and Misery

Life is short. Live it up.

Nikita Khrushchev, (New York Times Magazine, August 3, 1958), in Happiness and Misery and Life and Death

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Happiness and Misery

Waste not fresh tears over old griefs.

Unknown, in Happiness and Misery

Nostalgia is the realization that things weren't as unbearable as they seemed at the time.

Unknown, in Happiness and Misery

Misery is optional.

S. Gilmary Beagle, in Happiness and Misery

Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you will cease to be so.

John Stuart Mill, in Happiness and Misery

I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty.

John F. Kennedy, in Happiness and Misery

It is by fighting and triumphing over the enemies of the Buddha that we ourselves become Buddhas.

Daisaku Ikeda, (World Tribune, Oct. 29, 1999, p. 5), in Happiness and Misery and Science and Religion

Do not scorn the person who is perpetually happy. He does know something you don't.

Paul Jones, in Happiness and Misery